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Cam Marston didn't want to look at the face across the desk.
He didn't like his latest assignment, but what could he do? His
boss had ordered him to fire this employee, a nice guy who may not
have been a brilliant worker but was coming along. However, the
company was pretty successful: "I figured my boss knew what he
was doing," explains Marston. And so if this had been a movie
western instead of an average day in 1996, here's the part
where the then-26-year-old Marston would have cocked his pistol-and
fired.

The employee went down, pale and frightened. And then he
pleaded, "But why . . . ?"
"It's just a management decision, based on the way you fit
in here," said Marston, who actually had no clue why this poor
schmuck was getting the ax. "I thought this was going to be
the one," the employee gasped, shell-shocked, rubbing his
hands through his hair. "I really like it here. I liked the
product." Then he started to cry.
"I'm sorry," Marston wheezed. "I'm really
sorry." Eyes red, hair a mess, the employee slunk back to his
desk and gathered his photos of his wife and children. He clutched
his coffee cup and some pencils, and he started the long, miserable
trek out of the office. His shoulders were stooped, and though
tall, he looked very small. But just before he reached the exit,
Marston's boss emerged. He was, Marston swears, a beady-eyed
man with veins popping out of his neck. "Wait a minute,"
the boss said. "Cam just fired you, right?"
"Y-y-yes. What's going on?"
"Well, you're not let go," the boss announced
cheerfully. "I just wanted to see if Cam was able to fire you.
I didn't think he had the strength to do that. You're not
fired; get back on the phones. Cam, good job! Come into my
office."

The Boss From Hell. Most of us have worked for one. He or she is
the employer who, no doubt about it, was sent from Satan below to
make our lives miserable. The one who wields power like a Third
World dictator with a nuclear bomb. The one who may be the big
cheese, and this cheese is rancid. And you, with your meager
benefits and opportunities, stayed with that molding cheese, like a
starving mouse with nowhere else to go. Until you finally made your
escape. So it's a good chance to ask yourself: What did I learn
from my boss from hell? Am I a better boss for having worked for
somebody who made Jack the Ripper seem like a stand-up guy? Or,
like your dad and his inexplicable love for polka music and your
surprising appreciation for the genre, does the apple fall not far
from the tree?

Geoff Williams once had a boss from hell, or at least heck.
She would frown at him as he was leaving work on a Friday, and he
would worry about it until Monday morning, when he could then gauge
whether she had actually been angry at him or had just been
constipated.

Are You A Jerk?

If you've morphed into a boss from hell, you're going to
lose more than a popularity contest. Mean or devious bosses will
"experience low productivity, employees who will not make
decisions, high turnover and the inability to recruit a quality
staff," predicts Toni
Talbot, owner of Human Resource Management Services in
Williamston, Michigan. "Bosses from hell will eventually end
up taking the company to hell because no company can survive that
kind of management style. Not today, not in this economy." If
you had a wretched boss who treated you like a galley slave, relax
(a little): Chances are, you've already sworn never to treat
your own employees that way. But if you worked for a tyrant and
stayed on his or her good side, you may have subconsciously decided
the tyrant's tirades weren't a bad way to go.

As with watching the gazelles on a National Geographic
special, there are signs that can clue you in that the animals are
upset. (By the way, tip No. 1: Never refer to your employees as
"animals.") Few people likely aspire to be the boss from
hell. Sharon Jordan-Evans,
co-author of Love 'Em or Lose 'Em: Getting Good
People to Stay, suggests three warning signs of unhappy
employees:

1. Avoidance behavior.
"If this person doesn't ever seek you out, chat with you,
share information readily with you, those are clues that the
employee isn't comfortable with you. It doesn't mean
you're a jerk; it might be you're just not very
approachable."

2. Visible drop in productivity and
morale; increased absenteeism. "If people don't
seem very enthused, it's time to look in the mirror because
very often it has to do with the boss."

3. Heavy turnover. "If
you had a revolving door, wouldn't you get the idea that you
have something to do with that? But I can't tell you how many
bosses don't get it. They say 'Yup, that's just our
industry.' And they don't even check. Or they blame it on
the age group: 'Well, they just change jobs all the time.'
They find other excuses."

What They Learned

Kevin S. Grangier is president of CarryOn Communication, a publicity
firm in Beverly Hills, California, that opened in 1998. But before
that, he worked for a multitude of employers. Some were good; some
were not-like the boss who would often tell Grangier to fight the
heavy traffic and bring her paperwork to her house because she
didn't want to do it herself. "It was a one-hour
drive-each way," he sighs.

That same boss once told Grangier that if he wanted to leave the
office early to catch a flight for Thanksgiving weekend, it would
have to come out of his vacation time. So he offered to work on the
airplane, which the boss readily agreed to, as long as Grangier
didn't want to be paid for that time. But she did expect him to
bill the client (at $275 an hour) for the period spent working on
the airplane.

"I quit a few months after that," reports Grangier,
who says his own company is the antithesis of most of the companies
he worked for in the past. "My philosophy is that if you
create an environment that's fun to work in and respect your
employees, they'll be happy," he says. "If
they're happy, they'll do good work, and if they do good
work, of course, the client will be happy."

Grangier readily admits it isn't easy keeping employees in
good spirits, especially when you're experiencing rapid growth.
In a recent span of nine months, Grangier went from five employees
to 32, and his firm, which brought in $5 million in 2000, expects
$9 million this year. "It's easy to lose that comfortable
atmosphere. It can happen overnight if you allow it to," says
Grangier, who says he's passed on some big accounts simply
because he knew it would tax his staff. "[But] I don't
want employees dropping off like flies. Why would I want to do
anything to jeopardize something I've spent so much time
on?"

Heaven can appear through the clouds after working for the boss
from hell. In Marston's case, he quit a few weeks after being
forced to fire his colleague, and in 1996, he and his mother, Judy
Marston, started Marston
Communications in Charlotte, North Carolina. And now Cam's
life's work is to consult with employers who have trouble
relating to their under-35 employees. In short, Marston
Communications' goal is to forever rid the world of bosses from
hell.

And just how do you do that? It's not hard. At least, not on
paper. "Be absolutely honest," says Marston.
"Don't try to deceive: You can never get away with it. And
no one is an experiment. This is not a laboratory for you to see
what would happen if-these are people's lives you're
dealing with."

Then Marston reveals what is probably the best lesson any
employer can learn: "People aren't loyal to companies;
they're loyal to people they like."